Benjamin Clymer’s Gift

A story about love and loss and the mendingof the human heart…

Benjamin Clymer was a farmer whose wife taught him to read when he was twenty-three, which proved to be a salvation for him after her untimely death. Reading transported him into other people’s worlds, allowing him to temporarily forget his own loss. Years later he had an idea for a memorial to her, a workshop for writers that would be a nurturing place for them.

In the spring of 1927, he went to see an attorney, Charles Gustafson, to have his will drawn, never doubting that his wishes would be honored if there was a proper legal document. The attorney listened with amazement to Benjamin’s plan for his bequest and drew the will, insisting on a clause that Benjamin disliked. Without the clause, Gustafson wouldn’t have had a weapon in an unexpected battle to honor the terms of Benjamin’s most unusual gift.

Marian Schwartz is a novelist. Her first novel, Realities, was published in hardcover and paperback in the United States, as well as in England and Sweden, where it was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. She is the author of two other novels, The Last Season, The Story of a Marriage, and The Writers’ Conference, and Harry Danced Divinely, a collection of Giffort Street Stories.